Lecture 7 - Video Games Studies

Notes -

• Video Games Studies includes the following types of games:
  Arcade Games, Consoles, Computer Games, MUDs, MMOGs
• We can divide them into different genres based on their platform (hardware or software), and into sub-genres of different types of games - from First Person Shooters to adventure games.
• Video games have been intertwined with the development of computing technology since the development of Spacewar, in the mid-1960s.
• The military have always shown interest in video games as training tools, which has driven development of hardware to power their training simulations

Narratology vs Ludology -

• Narratology is the study of video games from the perspective of them being stories or literary works. People who follow this sort of approach think that games can be studied like 'texts' in the same way people study other 'texts'
• Ludology is not concerned with the story elements of games but rather with the Game Play elements. People who have written work that is classified as ludology tend to follow the argument that the story elements in many games are there for decoration only, and is incidental to just playing a game.

Other Approaches -

• We can look at video games in a technical sense, as coming to us in the same era as computers
• If we think of video games as mediums of communication, or expression, it is tempting to view them as having a history that follows film and cinema, and television. That is where we get the idea of narratology. Early video games did contain some cinematic elements (such as cut-scenes) but the act of playing the game was usually dramatically different.
• Semiotics - It's even possible to view video games as media. A game can be taken apart and examined to see how the process of making meaning operates in particular games.

The QUESTION : Are video games similar to, or different from, traditional games?

Lecture 6 - a brief history of the computer and internet

Notes -

• Computers were first commercially produced by IBM in the 1950s - large, unwieldy and expensive machines for military, government and corporate work
• 1965, Gordom Moore - Moore's law: the capacity of microchip's doubles every two years. This law has held true for over 40 years.
• Xerox PARC early 70s - mouse, graphical user interface (GUI)
• 1975 - first PC - Altair didn't have a language. Bill Gates started writing a language called BASIC for the Altair. In order to market his program he started a little company, the Microsoft.
• By 1980, IBM was determined to get into the PC market. Bill Lowe, promised IBM a product within one year: Open architecture - buying shelf products from a range of other companies and putting them together as a package.
• IBM needed a software - Bill Gates /Microsoft/ made PC DOS 1.0
• Apple - icon-based GUI (Graphical User Interface) - IBM and Microsoft came up with their own GUI - Windows

Internet

• The internet, is a network of networks.
• The idea came from Rand corporation in the 1960s - they developed a scheme for a network that could survive a nuclear war.
• A group of researchers from across the U.S. were already working on a system that they had called Packet Switching which is essentially breaking down messages into small chunks and transmitting them from one computer to another.
• ARPANET developed - downloading academic data - BBS - Bulletin Board Servers and MUDs - Multiple User Domains

World Wide Web

• The Web includes all the internet sites that people have made available on servers around the world.
• 'browsers' - Mosaic and Netscape became generally available in the early 1990s.
• Hyper Text Mark-up Language (HTML) is the name of the language in which web pages are written.
• Internet is not the same thing as the web.

Cyberspace

• 1972 Karl Popper wrote about the nature of reality as being divided into three worlds.
• The concept of cyberspace owes much to the work of William Gibson. He took the idea of cybernetics which is the study of particular types of systems of control and communication common to living organisms and machines.
• A conceptual space where words, relationships, data, wealth and power are manifested by people using Computer Mediated Communication technologies.

Early Internet Applications

• Electronic mail (Email)
• File Transfer Protocol (FTP)
• Internet Relay Chat (IRC)
• MUDs, MOOs, MUSHes, etc.

Tutorial 3

How do I use new communication technologies to communicate with my friends and family?

I have been using the internet for 10 years now. I have never been interested in meeting people on the internet, because it makes me feel uncomfortable that I can never be sure, who is on the other side. But, I use the internet in many other ways.

When I was a little girl, the only way of communication with those who were far away was letter-writing. It took a lot of time to write and post a letter, and the delivery was very slow. We only could see each other if we attached photos to our writing. If we wanted to hear the other person’s voice we could call them, but we never could see and hear them in the same time.

Now it is so easy. We just open up our laptops and write letters, one after another and the addressee can get it immediately. Now it is not a problem to see and hear our loved ones at the same time.

I am so far away from my home, so “Skype” is a huge help for me. I just put on my headset and talk to my family and friends as much as I like. If we want to see each other we just turn on our web cameras. And if we are in the mood of writing, we can chat by typing in the words.

But not only the internet gives us fast access to the ones we miss. I can write a text message (sms) to my Hungarian friends whenever I like and they can send me one, when ever they like. It’s very simple. If I would like to show something immediately to someone who is not with me, I just send an mms with a picture or a video.

Tutorial Task 4

1. Who was the creator of the infamous "lovebug" computer virus?

Onel de Guzman - http://www.cnn.com/

2. Who invented the paper clip?

The first bent-wire paper clip was patented by Samuel B. Fay in 1867. This clip was originally intended primarily for attaching tickets to fabric, although the patent recognized that it could be used to attach papers together. - http://www.officemuseum.com/

3. How did the Ebola virus get its name?

It was named after the Ebola area of Zaire where it was first discovered in an outbreak occurring in 1976, when there was also an outbreak in the western equatorial region of Sudan; a second outbreak occurred in the same area of Sudan in 1979. - http://www.britishcouncil.org/

4. What country had the largest recorded earthquake?

The largest recorded earthquake in the world was a magnitude 9.5 (Mw) in Chile on May 22, 1960. - http://earthquake.usgs.gov/

5. In computer memory/storage terms, how many kilobytes in a terabyte?

1073741824 kilobytes - http://www.t1shopper.com/

6. Who is the creator of email?

Ray Tomlinson, 1971 - http://au.encarta.msn.com/

7. What is the storm worm, and how many computers are infected by it?

W32.Storm.Worm is a worm that seeks out Microsoft Internet Information Services (IIS) systems that have not applied the proper security patches. Any such systems that it finds are then infected with the worm. When this worm is run, it sets up a server FTP thread and starts to scan 10,000,000 IP addresses in an attempt to find a vulnerable system at one of the targeted addresses. - http://www.symantec.com/

8. If you wanted to contact the prime minister of australia directly, what is the most efficient way?

Parliament House
Suite MG 8Parliament HouseCanberra ACT 2600
Tel:
(02) 6277 7700
Fax:
(02) 6273 4100

Griffith Electorate Office
630 Wynnum RoadMorningside, QLD, 4170
Tel:
(07) 3899 4031
Fax:
(07) 3899 5755

Postal Address:
PO Box 476AMorningside, QLD, 4170

Web:

http://www.pm.gov.au/contact/index.cfm

9. Which Brisbane-based punk band is Stephen Stockwell (Head of the School of Arts) a member of?

Black Assassins - https://secure6.ozhosting.com/brisbanewritersfestival/

"The Black Assassins were a dirty-assed punk rock band formed in Brisbane, Australia in the middle of 1981...The Black Assassins had strong political opinions but were very inexperienced musicians who knew no shame." - http://blackassassins.net/

10. What does the term "Web 2.0" mean in your own words?

A lot of web sites... - http://www.go2web20.net/

How do search engines rank the stuff they find on the internet?

They follow a set of rules, known as an algorithm. One of the the main rules in a ranking algorithm involves the location and frequency of keywords on a web page. Pages with the search terms appearing in the HTML title tag are often assumed to be more relevant than others to the topic. Search engines will also check to see if the search keywords appear near the top of a web page, such as in the headline or in the first few paragraphs of text. They assume that any page relevant to the topic will mention those words right from the beginning. Frequency is the other major factor in how search engines determine relevancy. A search engine will analyze how often keywords appear in relation to other words in a web page. Those with a higher frequency are often deemed more relevant than other web pages.- http://searchenginewatch.com/showPage.html?page=2167961